C-E Translation Of Essays Guided By Nord's Concept Of Expressive Function

Essays express their authors' feelings,emotions,and views with flexible writing methods.As such,characters and objects described in essays tend to be of relatively minor importance while the author's emotional experience is of focal significance.Therefore,in translation essays,Nord's conceptualization of expressive function plays an important role in recreating and transmitting the personal emotional expressions,feelings and views contained in essays.We Three,by famous Chinese essayist Yang Jiang,tells the story of her family life featuring mutual support,concomitance and separation over several decades.Recounting the emotional experience of her intellectual family,We Three presents a vivid and true to life picture of one of the stormiest eras in modern Chinese history.In addition,the author from a typical intellectual's perspective offers her own perception and evaluation of the peculiar social and political conditions and abnormal phenomena of the time.Thus,We Three,with its remarkable literary value as well as social and historical value has won wide readership in China.However,despite its popularity among Chinese readers,We Three so far has no published English version.It is this deplorable fact that stimulated me to choose part of We Three as the source text for my translation practice project completed as partial fulfillment of the requirements of my MTI program at Yangzhou University.In the process of completing this translation practice project,I adopt Nord's theoretical concepts on expressive function as my theoretical guideline.Based on theories put forward by Buhler,Reiss and Jacobson,Nord divided text functions into four types.These are referential function,expressive function,appellative function and phatic function.According to Nord,expressive function of a text conveys its author's emotion and attitudes.Based on a review of expressive functions consisting of emotional function,evaluative function and irony function,and in addition to a description of my translation practice project,this report discusses effective translation skills conducive to successful recreation and transmission of emotions,evaluations and opinions of original text in essay translation.